Ask Ziggy, the world's most advanced Natural Speech search engine for mobile devices, has closed a $5 million round of funding with a publicly traded multinational corporation and has expanded its list of strategic partners. Working closely with Nuance Communications, Ask Ziggy will use its most recent round of funding to deliver downloadable mobile apps for nearly all Android, Apple and Microsoft mobile devices by Q3 2012. "Each major funding event is a milestone in the growth of a rapidly developing company like Ask Ziggy," explained Shai Leib, CEO and Ask Ziggy Visionary. "Although we've had prior key investments via Sunbelt Technologies Management, when major publicly traded multinational companies begin to recognise the value of Ask Ziggy's cloud-based contextual search solutions, as was the case with this strategic investment, we have to celebrate. Ask Ziggy's Natural Speech search engine empowers and expands the user experience and convenience for all mobile devices, not merely cellphones. Speaking directly into a device and getting a voice reply, with zero typing required, is here at last. This funding will now enable Ask Ziggy to deliver multi-language, accent-independent, Natural Speech personal assistant apps running on all devices, including cellular handsets, tablets and even computing headsets, which will immediately change our world."

An independent Windows Phone developer has created an app for Microsoft's mobile platform that will attempt to outmatch Apple's intelligent voice-controlled assistant Siri. Ask Ziggy for Windows Phone is a free ad-free mobile app that can perform similar tasks to the iOS 5 voice assistant. "Ask Ziggy uses Speech Recognition to translate human speech into transcribed text, which is displayed in a speech bubble. The transcribed text is analyzed for patterns to detect commands or general queries. Commands are interpreted and routed to routine phone tasks such as emailing, texting, calling, social network updates, and getting directions," said Shai Leib, the app's developer, told WPcentral.